COPA v Satoshi judgment: Why Justice Mellor got it wrong

The COPA v Wright judgment by Justice James Mellor can be found here, and appendix here. Court documents were posted by COPA here. If you missed the trial you can hear a play by play recording of most of the trial here: day1, day2, day3, day4, day5, day6, day7, day9, day10, final day.

There was also some good transcripts reported by the BSV court reporter, found here: day1, day2, day3, day4, day5, day6, day7, day8, day9, day10, day11, day12, day13, day14, day15, day16, day17, day18, day20, day21, day22. The case is being appealed by Dr. Wright on August 5th, 2024.

Paying close attention to the Bitcoin space over the last many years, and also to the COPA v Wright trial, leads one to a much different conclusion than Judge Mellor’s assertion that Dr. Wright “lied”, “forged documents”, and used “technobabble” in defending against the claims of COPA that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto the creator of Bitcoin.

Judge Mellor’s written judgment is a lengthy 381 pages with appendix, but there are several key mistakes and misunderstandings in his judgment, when it comes to the evidence presented, and the claims made by Dr. Wright and COPA. For one, Mellor’s remarks on “technobabble”, which he refers to right out of the gate on page 8 of his judgment, and point two of his summary, show that Mellor is admitting to having a lack of understanding of the technical aspects which Dr. Wright was discussing at trial. Using the word “technobabble” 10 times in his written judgment, it casts doubt on the integrity and competency of the the England and Wales High Court of Justice. The “technobabble” argument is something more at home in places like Reddit and Twitter than in an actual court of law. Mellor even used random tweet comments as evidence in his judgment. Judgments should be done based on merit and understanding of the facts presented at trial, and it is clear that Mellor has admitted to a vast misunderstanding of the evidence and explanations from Dr. Wright. Mellor, by asserting Wright’s arguments are “technobabble”, has demonstrated and admitted that he is ignorant of how the Bitcoin network functions on a technical level.

Trying to paint Dr. Wright as incompetent technologically is a tall task, considering his many qualifications and degrees, and his history and experience in the business world. Wright’s doctoral dissertation is found here. He has numerous GIAC certifications and is a SANS cyber guardian. He has filed over 1000 blockchain related patents, taught courses on advanced concepts for years, including running a Bitcoin class on youtube, and has showcased himself to be highly competent, helping Bitcoin scale to 4GB blocks on main net and 1M tx/sec on teranode testnet. He understood the smart contracting capability of Bitcoin before anyone else. Not only that but Dr. Wright was also ruled the sole creator of Bitcoin in a jury trial in the USA, and Satoshi’s early partner in deploying Bitcoin, Gavin Andresen, has testified under oath that he believes Dr. Wright has Satoshi’s keys after witnessing cryptographic signed messages from Block 1 and Block 9.

Yet people more incompetent than Dr. Wright, with little understanding of the Bitcoin system are respected as “experts”, while the truth of the technology and Dr. Wright’s evidence seems largely ignored by Judge Mellor. Instead the words of Adam Back, CEO of BlockStream are more highly respected by Mellor, even though during the trial Back demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of what “floating point” means in academic terms. This is highly unusual for someone who is supposed to be an academic cryptographer with a PhD. Another instance of incompetency was when the “crypto expert” Sarah Meiklejohn demonstrated that she did not even understand the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork, something fundamental to the understanding of Bitcoin and its history of protocol changes.

More incompetency from Mellor, COPA, and the experts was shown through the revelation of the “Madden Report”, from COPA’s expert witness Mr. Madden who claimed on the stand to have met with COPA’s solicitors 8 different times in order for them to help him “finesse” his report. This draws into question whether Madden’s report is in fact independently written and not influenced by COPA. In his report, Mr. Madden claims that Dr. Wright’s documents are forgeries because of meta data anomalies, which could often be explained by benign explanations, or because Madden refused to do the proper investigation that an expert witness should.

A big example of this is when Madden and the other experts refused to analyze the Enterprise versions of the software which Dr. Wright claims to have used. For example Judge Mellor’s explanations for why he knows Dr. Wright did not use the Enterprise version of Grammarly are very lackluster. Another example is when Madden, COPA, and Mellor claim that the files altered by Citrix were forgeries. But looking at the Citrix website you can see that again the enterprise version is available and likely what Dr. Wright uses in his business environments. It is very plausible that meta data changes could be explained by the use of the enterprise version, but again the “experts” forgot to check it, either by accident or purposefully. Another example of this is when Madden, and COPA claimed that the MYOB files were also forgeries due to metadata anomalies. Dr. Wright claimed that it was because the experts failed to examine the live version which the experts admitted under oath. Judge Mellor doesn’t believe these arguments and says Dr. Wright is lying and using technobabble. But a quick glance at the MYOB website will confirm what Dr. Wright said was correct that the live version of MYOB is the only source of truth. But again experts admit they failed to check the live version which would be responsible for apparent meta data changes, and instead accuse Dr. Wright of forgeries saying it is “proven”.

A further problem with Mellor’s written judgment is when he agreed with “experts” that the Bitcoin whitepaper was not written in Latex but Open Office. However according to experts in the Latex field who write blogs about Latex, it is possible to write a paper in Latex and then upload it to a software like Microsoft Word or Open Office. The diagrams in the Bitcoin whitepaper can be drawn using Latex code. COPA and their “experts” tried to frame inconsistencies in the latex evidence claiming that a certain font was not available at the time. But people have found tools that would enable someone to create a custom version of fonts. Also the “expert” Rosenthal admitted to using a different distribution than Dr. Wright used.

While Dr. Wright’s explanations are very plausible, Mellor gives him no benefit of the doubt and instead chooses to assume Dr. Wright is a liar and calls him such, and also claims the documents are proven forgeries. These assertions do not have the proof backing them up that Mellor claims.

COPA and Mellor again try to paint Dr. Wright as incompetent, claiming he answered wrongly when asked on the stand about describing what an “unsigned integer” is in C++ coding. Dr. Wright said “it is larger”. His opposition claim this answer is incorrect because a better answer might be “it is positive”. But Dr. Wright’s explanation is also completely valid. An unsigned int, does indeed allow you to store a bigger number, twice as large as signed integers. Again Dr. Wright’s explanations are entirely correct and plausible, yet Mellor claims he is a liar and only uses technobabble to deceive people. Another instance of misunderstanding is when COPA and Mellor claim that Dr. Wright did not understand the checkblock function in Bitcoin. Dr. Wright said it is used to check the blockheader, but the developers claim that it was not implemented yet. This is a complete non-starter for anyone who understands the purpose of the merkle tree and SPV as described in the whitepaper. The SPV blockheader technology and checkblock function is fundamental to how the Bitcoin system is designed to scale. It was not added later as COPA and Mellor claim. Satoshi said in the early days that the design for the “far future” is SPV and checking blockheaders. It is not surprising that Mellor could not understand SPV, as most of the crypto space can’t figure out how to implement the idea properly either, and Dr. Wright has received a series of patents related to the deployment of SPV technology onto Bitcoin.

Although Mellor does not seem to make much mention of it in his judgment, some of the online opposition has criticized Dr. Wright for mentioning that the merkle tree in Bitcoin is a binary search tree. They say this is wrong because they know that an ordering is required for a merkle tree to be used as a binary search tree. But what they fail to understand is that Bitcoin is naturally ordered chronologically as a timestamp system, and this is why the merkle tree in Bitcoin is indeed a binary search tree.

Another accusation levied by COPA and Mellor is that Dr. Wright’s BlackNet paper which was a precursor to the Bitcoin whitepaper is a forgery. Judge Mellor outlines this in section 5 of his appendix. According to Mellor this document is a forgery because Dr. Wright claims that it was from 2002, but metadata shows that the file was altered in 2014. It is very plausible that opening a file years later in a new software could alter and update metadata, but also 2014 is still very early. Are we supposed to believe Dr. Wright had been preparing to deceive the world that he is Satoshi since 2014? Mellor himself claims on page 7 of his appendix that Wright did alter documents in 2016 when he first began to claim he is Satoshi Nakamoto. In that case, these documents from 2014 do not line up with Judge Mellor’s 2016 theory. All of these facts just are not adding up to a strong case for COPA and Mellor.

Mellor goes on to claim that for Dr. Wright’s stories to line up, it would mean that many people were conspiring against him, which Mellor paints as implausible. It is however, hard to argue that there has not been a conspiracy against Dr. Wright. As outlined in my recent message to President Trump about Bitcoin, there have been numerous death threats against Dr. Wright including from Max Keiser an investor in Kraken and a COPA litigant. Another Kraken investor Roger Ver has advocated assassination markets. Dr. Wright’s opposition have their own dragon’s den forum where they organize propaganda campaigns against Dr. Wright and his vision for Bitcoin. A crypto CEO Jameson Lopp has made violent comments about putting Dr. Wright “in a box” and has also made lists of members of the BSV community, and supports assassination markets. One of Lopp’s employees posted photos on Twitter shooting bullet holes through photo’s of Dr. Wright’s face. The maintainer of bitcoin.org Cobra Bitcoin, also involved in the case says he wishes BSVers to “die” and has also supported assassination markets. There is a 9 billion GBP class action lawsuit in the UK against exchanges who delisted BSV, but Mellor says there is no conspiracy against Bitcoin and Satoshi’s vision.

An American exchange Kraken who is a member of COPA, also have done delist polls and campaigns against BSV on Twitter. We also see the activities of former BTC-Core developer and co-founder of BlockStream (a COPA member), Gregory Maxwell. Due to a slip up, Maxwell has been caught red handed using an alternative reddit account to make posts attacking Dr. Wright and the BSV community, in many slanderous posts, for years. Although Maxwell seems to still deny this, the evidence is clear. He has even made numerous comments about being the “Invisible Hand” which can manipulate markets, and Maxwell has said that pseudonymity is a tool. He has also lobbied users to demand exchanges delist BSV. Maxwell thinks he can control the narrative around Satoshi and Dr. Wright. Maxwell has even started to prepare a new narrative that if Dr. Wright signed with Satoshi’s keys publicly, it is because Satoshi didn’t actually mine early blocks, and Wright may have bought the keys from someone else. It is clear that Dr. Wright is a threat to the BTC promoters and COPA members, because Satoshi is a threat to them as they have admitted. Even Coinbase a COPA member, has listed the revealing of Satoshi’s identity as one of the biggest risks to their business during their IPO filing. Coinbase has also delisted BSV assets, selling users BitcoinSV without their permission. It is hard to be faced with these facts and still claim there is no conspiracy against BSV and Dr. Wright.

Further evidence of this conspiracy is admitted here by HEX ponzi scheme founder Richard Heart (AKA Richard Schueler) who has also been charged by the SEC for misappropriating millions of dollars of investor funds. Schueler heckeled and harassed Dr. Wright at a conference in 2017, shouting at him while he was on the stage. Later Schueler would admit to “lying and cheating and stealing to get segwit” on the BTC network. It is interesting that Schueler also mentions Bitgo as a counter party holding investor assets, which is also a company where Jameson Lopp was employed, the man who has made lists of BSVers and threatened to put Dr. Wright “in a box” on Twitter posts. So it appears these entities who attack Dr. Wright have a financial incentive to maintain the status quo of a broken BTC system.

Another remarkable coincidence is that the social media company Facebook changed its name to “Meta” in 2021. However this was years after Dr. Wright had talked about “Meta” as the “Metanet” since at least 2018, using his patented ideas and blockchain technology. Meta would later join COPA in their patent alliance in 2022. However Meta mysteriously was removed from the COPA website members list, just prior to the launch of the COPA v Wright trial. With all of these coincidences, it would be more bizarre to claim there is not some type of vast conspiracy against Dr. Wright and Satoshi’s vision for Bitcoin.

Another large problem with Judge Mellor’s judgment is that he says he does not believe Dr. Wright’s claims about former nChain CEO Mr. Ager-Hanssen being a bad actor. Yet since Mellor’s judgment was handed down, the disgraced former nChain CEO Ager-Hanssen has been sentenced to 10 months in prison for contempt of court over his data theft at the nChain company. These new events since judgment lend more credibility to Dr. Wright’s testimony and also to the testimony of Stefan Matthews who claimed during trial, on the stand, that Ager-Hanssen tried to intimidate him not to testify and pounded his fist on a desk. Ager-Hanssen’s connection to Black Cube, an intelligence outfit with connections to Mossad, make these events all the more mysterious.

A worrying aspect of Mellor’s decision is that he handed it down unexpectedly from the bench on the final day of the trial. It makes one wonder if he was able to properly assess the vast amounts of evidence in the case with such a hasty judgment. One of the stranger parts of Mr. Mellor’s judgment was where he pretended what he would do if he was Satoshi Nakamoto. The term “Satoshi would have” appears 10 times in hid judgment. On page 11 of his judgment, Mellor says he doesn’t think Satoshi would ever set out to prove his identity in litigation. This seems like a strange assumption to make, with no evidence to back it up other than Mellor’s hunch about how other people think. It is a wonder what kind of logic and reasoning this judge is using in his judgment. It seems that Judge Mellor presents himself as an extremely clever person. He even claims to know the inner thoughts of men capable of inventing world changing technology, and claims to be able to perceive Bitcoin “technobabble” with cunning precision. However, in my analysis, Mellor is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. An appeal in the COPA v Wright case is coming August 5th, and we should remember Bitcoin is under a spiritual war. We should all keep Satoshi and the others fighting for the truth of Bitcoin in our prayers. We should ask God to deliver us from the COPA spirit of evil, and to preserve Satoshi’s vision for Bitcoin into the far future. The power of Bitcoin’s Light will soon overcome the power of “crypto” darkness.